Scripted removal of placed respawning actors

[SKKmods]

Many of my solutions involve the scripted real time finding and replacing of stuff for dynamic surprises rather than unsurprising static hacks.

 

One thing I have never established conclusivley is:

 

(a) if an actor generated by a placed [M] actor spawner

(b) that is marked for respawn

© in a resetting encounterzone cell

(d) is moved to a hidden noreset holding cell without being killed (usually with AI disabled)

 

... when their original cell resets, the placed [M] spawner will not trigger the actor to respawn since its "product" is still alive, just in another cell.

 

Which is excatly how I manage my own respawn markers: on trigger/timer it counts active linkedrefs from its spawned actors and if they are still alive. Of course the actors need to be held persistent so they can resolve if they have ewandred off and unloaded.

 

Original observations from waaaaay back in 2017 SUGGESTED since the original actor is still alive its [M] spawner would not generate another spawn to avoid object/save bloating. BUT as those base game placed actors are typically NOT persistent and are of course unloaded when moved to a holding cell, they have to be stashed in a RefCollectionAlias to hold them persistent / resolvable.

 

I have been receiving user reports that original placed actor [M] spawners MAY BE (all user reports treated with scepticism) respawning when their original actors are still alive in a holding cell.

 

Anyone have observations or tests in this area ?

[Fantafaust]

I had a similar issue a while back with my collected npc corpses despawning before players could drop them back into the world, which I eventually solved by putting an unplayable quest item in their inventory.

Maybe this will help?

[SKKmods]

Thing is that the original actors do not despawn. They are still in the noreset holding cell and in the RefCollectionAlias.

[Fantafaust]

Do you have a testing methodology for the users? tbh my first assumption is that they're mistaken somehow.
But perhaps you could implement a way to display the linkedref npcs count in a message box and have them screenshot it for you?

[SKKmods]

No I never rely on user sourced data due to the generally f***ed up state of their hacked games. If I cant reproduce an issue it is not fixable by me.

 

Well I did used to include user diagnostics in some complex mods, but that effort proved to be 99% worthless.

 

I suspect that it is to do with object persistence and the original spawner unable to resolve/find its products so its respawning more of them on the reset trigger.

[Fantafaust]

I mean, does the spawner need to stay enabled while the npc is verifiably alive in a different cell?

[SKKmods]

How do you disable a base game placed [M] spawner ?

 

If you call disable on the ObjectReference (and it doesnt have an enable state parent) that disables the actor not the underlying spawner ...

[Fantafaust]

Perhaps Enabled was the wrong word.

I believe you can call delete on a spawner without affecting the npc. Of course, then it's deleted lol

 

I'll trawl the wiki for a bit

[SKKmods]

The issue is getting a handle to the underlying placed [M] spawner.

 

There is no method in the known universe.

[Fantafaust]

True. But if you wanted to do a ton of work you could replace the vanilla spawners with markers and use PlaceActorAtMe scripts.

 

Of course, PlaceActorAtMe also has its issues, sometimes the npc isn't initially hostile.